


please, say to me

by MagicalSpaceDragon



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Chirolinguistics, Dysphoria, Gen, Guilt, Hurt/No Comfort, Self-Destructive Behavior
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-10-06 10:08:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20505212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagicalSpaceDragon/pseuds/MagicalSpaceDragon
Summary: He starts speaking Hand to himself.





	please, say to me

**Author's Note:**

> posted this to my tumblr A While ago, finally decided to clean it up and put it on AO3. written for the prompt 'language'.

He starts speaking Hand to himself.

It's easy to hide. Probably easier to hide than if he were speaking it to someone else. He just clasps his hands together—under the table and squeezed tight with anxiety, out in plain sight so it doesn't look like he's got anything to hide, fingers laced under his chin with his palms far apart so it feels like broken fragments of words. Even if anybody notices the way his hands twitch and shift against each other, it just looks like fidgeting. It _is_ fidgeting.

Most of the time he's just signing nonsense to himself. His mind catches on a word and he spells it out back and forth, one hand to the other, until another one takes its place. Sometimes it turns into a garbled mess of a bunch of words that all feel like each other.

Sometimes he sees how fast he can translate what somebody's saying. He thought it would be a great way to pay attention, except he gets caught up in the harder words and by the time he remembers them Magnus is three long, long sentences ahead and he didn't hear any of them. He still does it, though, because it keeps his hands busy and keeps him from dying of boredom.

Sometimes he sits in the darkness of his hab, holding his own hand and pretending it's somebody else's. Not, you know, anybody's in particular, because that would be stupid. And selfish, considering some of the stuff he says.

_It's okay,_ he tries at first, but then he laughs, a little too loud and a little too long, and he doesn't bother with that one again.

_I'll be back._ Feels too much like a lie.

_You did what you had to do_ makes his plating fit all wrong. He wants to tug and scratch and scrape at every little misaligned edge until his body is _right_ again, but he _can't,_ because someone _always_ notices when he doesn't want them to, and if someone notices _here_ there's going to be pitying looks and whispered concerns about his fitness for captaincy, so instead he rushes out to be the kind of self-destructive nobody cares about. Nobody questions him getting drunk or banging himself up doing something stupid, and on good nights he can even bang himself back into a shape that doesn't feel like wearing a stranger's frame.

_I hate you,_ he tries, just to see if he can bear the weight of it. He can't. Maybe he should repeat it to himself over and over until he can take it gracefully, because he owes it to Drift to be able to hear it and accept it and not make a fragging _scene_ over it, because who is he kidding, he deserves it. He knows he does. He deserves to be hated and told so in no uncertain words, and Drift deserves to be able to say it without him making it all about himself, _again._

He doesn't practice.

_I miss you,_ he says. He can't even begin to pretend that it's anyone's hand but his own. _I miss you. I'm sorry. Please come back. Please don't hate me._

Obviously there's no answer.


End file.
